21st Century Wire says…
As 21WIRE reported earlier this week, the situation in Jerusalem continues to remain on a knife edge.
The level of incitement surrounding one of the most sensitive holy sites in the world has never been higher, and now Jewish Israeli extremists are coming to the fore to reveal the true Israeli fundamentalist Zionist desire regarding the formerly ‘neutral’ city of Jerusalem.
According to writer Dan Cohen (see article below), the following Israeli leaders and politicians who support a Jewish takeover of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem:
Deputy defense minister Eli Ben-Dahan, deputy foreign minister Tzipi Hotovely of Likud, Jerusalem affairs minister Zeev Elkin of Likud, Likud lawmaker Oren Hazan, Knesset speaker Yuli Edelstein of Likud, Culture minister Miri Regev of Likud, Justice minister Ayelet Shaked of Jewish Home, Agriculture minister Uri Ariel of Jewish Home, Public security minister Gilad Erdan of Likud, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, former deputy defense minister Danny Danon of Likud, former public security minister, Yitzhak Aharonovitch of the Yisrael Beitenu party, Deputy Knesset speaker and a former secretary-general of the nominally leftist Labor Party Yehiel Hilik Bar, David Tzur, a former lawmaker for the ostensibly “dovish” Hatnua party, led by Tzipi Livni, has also called for Jewish prayer at the al-Aqsa compound, and former lawmaker Michael Ben-Ari, a leading inciter against Africans and Palestinians who once destroyed a copy of the New Testament on video, and others.
More from Electronic Intifada…
Temple movement leader Yehuda Glick, right, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. (via Facebook)
Electronic Infifada
Since the gun battle at the al-Aqsa compound on 14 July that ended in the deaths of three Palestinian citizens of Israel and two Israeli police, Israeli media have largely focused on outrage that anyone would carry out an attack at a holy site, while praising Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s collective punishment against the Palestinian population.
“They are the strife mongers,” Yedioth Ahronot columnist Ben-Dror Yemini wrote. “They are harming the justified struggle for equality. They are spreading lies and nurturing incitement. For our sake, for their sake, Israel’s Arabs should also get rid of this nuisance.”
“Netanyahu and [PA leader Mahmoud] Abbas both acted responsibly to prevent a holy war; but the Arab world’s condemnation of Israel is a reason for concern,” read the subheading of an analysis by Haaretz’s Barak Ravid.
Missing from commentaries across the board has been any acknowledgment of the role played by fanatical settlers intent on wresting control of the al-Aqsa compound in occupied East Jerusalem and eventually destroying it as part of an apocalyptic vision.
The compound, known to Muslims as Haram al-Sharif and to Jews as Temple Mount, includes the al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock. It is one of the holiest shrines for Muslims all over the world, as well as a touchstone of Palestinian identity.
‘Game Changer’
Israelis who seek to take over al-Aqsa see the 14 July attack and subsequent violence as an opportunity to advance this agenda. Immediately after the incident, the Temple movement’s official body released a statement calling to expel Palestinians from the compound: “We must liberate the Temple Mount from the murderous Islam and return it to the people of Israel.”
“Looking forward to building the Temple this year and hope that you will soon see the face of our righteous Messiah,” Baruch Marzel one of the most extreme leaders among Israel’s West Bank settlers, wrote last week in an open letter to the mufti of Jerusalem – the top Muslim official in the city.
Bezalel Smotrich, a Jewish Home party lawmaker, does not want to wait that long. “I would set up a synagogue on the Temple Mount today, this morning,” he said on Monday.
Under Israeli military protection, these settlers and extremists tour the grounds on a daily basis, hoping to provoke violent reactions from Palestinian worshippers by shouting and singing nationalistic anthems.
This then provides occupation forces with the necessary pretext to enact harsh measures, with the eventual goal of cleansing non-Jews and replacing the Muslim holy sites there with a Jewish temple, thus triggering a civilizational clash with Islam.
Yehuda Glick, a longtime leader of the Temple movement, now a Likud Party lawmaker, last week welcomed Israel’s ban on Muslims entering the al-Aqsa compound in the days following the shootings.
“This is an enormous game changer,” he said. “Everything is part of the redemption process but the things that happen on the Temple Mount are especially so.”
“Radical Muslims who desecrate with blood the holiness of the Temple Mount, the holiest place to the Jewish people, have no right to be there,” Glick and the Jewish Home party’s Shuli Moalem-Refaeli said.
Last week, Glick held a Temple movement emergency session in the Knesset building, Israel’s parliament. Attendees included genocide advocate Rabbi Yisrael Ariel and Bentzi Gopstein, leader of the anti-miscegenation youth movement Lehava.
Genocidal ideology
Yisrael Ariel, the chief rabbi of the Temple movement, articulated an apocalyptic end times scenario in 2015.
“[God] is the one who commanded us to go from city to city conquering them, and to impose the seven laws [of the Sons of Noah] throughout the world,” Ariel said.
Ariel added that if Muslims and Christians “raise the flag of [surrender] and say, ‘From now on, there is no more Christianity and no more Islam,’ and the mosques and Christian spires come down,” then they would be allowed to live. “If not,” he warned, “you kill all of their males by sword. You leave only the women.”
“We will conquer Iraq, Turkey [and] we will get to Iran too,” Ariel proclaimed.
Ariel is the founder and head of the Temple Institute, the government-funded group that has published detailed blueprints and a computer animation of what the Temple, to be built over the ruins of al-Aqsa, will look like.
The Temple Institute has received funding from Israel’s education ministry to develop a curriculum to instill “longing for the Temple” in children as young as those attending kindergarten. In 2013, Israel’s mayor of Jerusalem, Nir Barkat, presented Ariel with an award for his organization’s work.
This genocidal ideology is rooted in religious Zionism and its political wing is represented by the Jewish Home party.
In 2012, Zevulun Orlev, one of the party’s lawmakers in the Knesset, called for the construction of a temple at the compound, saying that removing the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa mosque would mean that the “billion-strong Muslim world would surely launch a world war.”
This messianic extremism has taken hold in the Likud Party of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as well…
Continue this story at Electronic Intifada
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